Tag: donating blood

Even with a scheduled appointment to give blood today, I still had to wait over a half an hour just to begin the interview process, which itself takes another 15-20 minutes. Ridiculous, I thought. What’s the point of having a bar-coded donor card if me and other regular donors still have to answer the same 40+ questions about our entire histories? Why waste so much time when they know the answers I’ve given every previous visit? It’s not like the hot-tub time machine has whisked me to sub-Saharan Africa for tattoos, prostitute sex, and dura mater transplants. Why not confine their queries to the past 12 months and get to the leeching?

“Because the FDA is retarded,” said the phlebotomist. That’s a direct quote.

According to her, the FDA requires the Red Cross to ask the same questions every time you donate even though they also order them to keep a database of donors containing your answers. The phlebotomist said she had likewise challenged the repetitive questionnaire during her training courses, but the FDA demands that everyone who walks through the door be treated as if he or she is a first-time donor. That’s why the process takes so long.

A group of Democratic senators, led by John Kerry, are requesting the FDA overturn their lifetime ban on accepting blood donations from gay men. The ban was established in 1983 to prevent the spread of HIV infection through the blood supply. The FDA states the ban also prevents the spread of hepatitis as gay men have a higher rate of infection than the general population.

Technically, no. The act of donating blood while gay is not illegal. What is illegal is for the donation center to knowingly accept blood from donors who meet certain criteria issued by the FDA. From the FDA website:

FDA requires blood centers to maintain lists of unsuitable donors to prevent the use of collections from them.

This may be splitting hairs, but if the act of donating or attempting donation was criminal, local jails would be bursting not only with gay men but with many other altruistic offenders as well.

I’m O negative, the universal donor, so my blood is a hot commodity — so valuable I have to give it away for free! — and I donate fairly regularly because that’s how my species reproduces. When you donate, you first have to answer a lengthy and tedious verbal questionnaire not only about sexual behavior, drug use, blood transfusions, tattoos, piercings, and hepatitis, but also about brain-membrane transplants, living and eating meat in the British Isles (worries about mad-cow and Creutzfeldt-Jakob diseases), travels in Africa, Lyme disease, and — most terrifying of all — Babesiosis, which one phlebotomist/Countess Bathory described to me as a “super Lyme disease” prevalent in southern New England. Answering yes to some of these questions may result in temporary deferrals from donating; others will ban you permanently. None will result in arrest. The worst that could happen is if you lied and then perjured yourself by signing the paperwork.

Also according to the FDA, the questionnaire filters out “approximately 90 percent of unsuitable donors,” though of course only a portion of them actually have dirty blood. The FDA is discriminating against whole swaths of people based on their experiences, not just gay men. This suggests to me the nation’s blood supply isn’t in dire straits as we are sometimes led to believe.

As a universal donor, you can see how my blood is doubly desirable because of my wholesome clean living. I’ve never gotten a tattoo, never banged another dude, never traveled in sub-Saharan Africa, never lived abroad…